RSS
Revisiting Betty Friedan’s Jewish legacy through the first biography of her in decades
(JTA) — When Betty Friedan published “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963, she set fire to a simmering discontent among millions of American women, blowing up the myth that feminine fulfillment began and ended with a husband, children and a home. But 17 years after her death, many retrospectives have summed up Friedan as the leader of a women’s movement that outgrew her.
A new biography from Rachel Shteir, “Betty Friedan: Magnificent Disrupter,” published Sept. 12 as part of Yale University’s ongoing Jewish Lives series, aims to offer a more comprehensive portrait of the complex, often controversial Jewish feminist. The first book on Friedan’s life since the 1990s shows the evolution of her Jewish identity, starting as a source of alienation that molded her rage against injustice. That identity, as Shteir explains, at first takes a backseat to her battle for women’s rights but eventually finds a stage at the center of Friedan’s public life.
“The Feminine Mystique” made Friedan a celebrity and catapulted her into the early leadership of second-wave feminism, fighting on the frontlines of workplace equality, women’s education and access to birth control and abortion. Friedan believed that suburban, middle-class housewives would make women’s rights acceptable to the American mainstream and become the key to vast social change. At the same time, her vision of the future of feminism left many people out: She became notorious for neglecting Black and working-class women in her manifesto and for excluding lesbians from the movement.
However, according to Shteir, the perception that Friedan’s movement left her behind overlooks the lasting influence of her ideas. While researching the activist, Shteir observed that many recent feminist writers have drawn from or reacted to Friedan, often without crediting her directly.
“She generated so many of the conversations that we take for granted,” Shteir told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Friedan built her ideals on the foundation of her personal life and experiences. She was born Bettye Goldstein to Jewish immigrants in Peoria, Illinois, in 1921. Her Russian father Harry Goldstein worked as a jeweler, and her Hungarian mother Miriam Horowitz Goldstein worked as a journalist until Bettye was born. Miriam gave up her work to be a wife and a mother, an ordinary sacrifice for the time that she never recovered from, according to her daughter.
“Nothing my father did, nothing he bought her, nothing we did ever seemed to satisfy her,” Friedan recalled in the 1976 book “It Changed My Life: Writings on the Women’s Movement.” Friedan said that her mother pined to fill the emptiness in her life by joining social circles and buying material luxuries — things not guaranteed for a Jewish family in the Depression-era Midwest.
Friedan’s early experiences of antisemitism became another lens that defined her fury against injustice, said Joyce Antler, a scholar of Jewish feminism and former professor at Brandeis University.
“She said that antisemitism was the ‘dominant menace’ of her childhood,” Antler told the JTA. “Not being accepted socially, not being accepted in the high school sorority — all this gave her a sense of being an outsider. It was through her Jewishness that she had the vision, the foresight to understand women’s exclusion.”
As a brilliant student, Friedan studied psychology at Smith College and began postgraduate work at the University of California Berkeley, where she dropped the “e” from her first name. She abandoned her fellowship to preserve a relationship with the man she was dating, which ended anyway. From there she moved to New York and became a labor journalist, writing on union issues, Jim Crow laws and antisemitism.
In 1947 she married Carl Friedan, a would-be theater producer who held intermittent work. They had three children and moved to the Rockland County suburbs of New York. Although Friedan continued freelance writing for women’s magazines to support the family, she saw herself as a housewife.
It was at a Smith College reunion in 1957, talking with her classmates 15 years after they graduated, that Friedan found the spark of “The Feminine Mystique.” She interviewed women who had succeeded by the standards they knew — suburban homes, husbands, children and modern cleaning appliances — but still felt there was a hole in their lives. After building an entire identity around their families, some said they felt as if they “didn’t exist.”
“The Feminine Mystique,” inspired by these educated women and Friedan’s own experiences, instantly hit a nerve. At the time, women could not open bank accounts or credit cards in their own names, were shunned out of jobs and ridiculed for raising the notion of sex discrimination. The book was translated into over a dozen languages and sold more than three million copies, giving voice to an epidemic of unhappiness that Friedan called “the problem that has no name.”
“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women,” read her opening words. “It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone.”
Rachel Shteir is the head of the Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism program at the Theatre School at DePaul University. (Yale Jewish Lives/Doug McGoldrick)
In 1966, Friedan joined Pauli Murray and Aileen Hernandez to found the National Organization for Women (NOW). She became the first president of the group, which remains one of the leading feminist organizations in the United States. Its goals included the enforcement of anti-discrimination law, subsidized child care for working mothers, legalized abortion and public accommodations protections. She also helped found the National Association for the Repeal of Abortion Laws (NARAL) in 1969, since renamed Reproductive Freedom for All, and the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971.
Her efforts changed hiring practices, gender pay inequality and credit-granting rules. But the ground shifted beneath her as younger, more diverse voices gained power. Friedan was fiery-tempered and fiercely resistant to those who disagreed with her, whether outside or inside her movement. She once described writer Gloria Steinem and Democratic Representative Bella Abzug (both Jewish) as “female chauvinist boors.” She dismissed the interests of younger bra-burning feminists — who centered sexual harassment and rape over marriage and child care — and she infamously called lesbian women the “lavender menace.”
Friedan believed the future of women’s rights depended on mainstream respectability, said Shteir. In embracing that model herself, she paid a high toll. She did not leave her physically abusive marriage for 22 years, despite black eyes that she covered with make-up for TV appearances.
She also did not talk publicly about her Jewishness until the 1970s.
Friedan stepped down from the presidency of NOW in 1970. But in her last speech as president, she announced the Women’s Strike for Equality, a nationwide action that drew tens of thousands of women to rallies in 40 American cities. On Fifth Avenue in New York City, 50,000 women marched for equal opportunity, free abortion and universal childcare.
Many of these women had little in common with the demographic she had imagined. Alongside the housewives marched radical feminists, lesbians, Black Power advocates, union women and pacifists. Standing before them in Bryant Park, Friedan addressed the crowd with a revised Jewish prayer, traditionally recited by Orthodox men every morning.
“Down the generations in history, my ancestor prayed, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, I was not created a woman,’” she said. “From this day forward women all over the world will be able to say, ‘I thank Thee, Lord, I was created a woman.’”
The moment was a breakthrough for Friedan, according to Antler. On that day, she finally tore through the “feminine mystique” to affirm her full identity in public — as both a feminist and a Jew. It was after this speech that Friedan revisited the role of Judaism in her work, turning her energies to fight antisemitism in the women’s movement and sexism in Jewish institutions. She also became more involved in Jewish life during the 1970s and 80s, said Shteir, giving many talks to Jewish groups and going to synagogue regularly until the end of life.
It turned out, as Friedan saw in the throng of people she herself had pulled to the streets during the Women’s Strike for Equality, that the future of feminism was broader than she knew. And many of the causes women marched for in 1970, from free child care to legalized abortions, remain out of reach for millions of Americans in 2023.
“When you read ‘The Feminine Mystique,’ it’s a little bit dismaying, because it feels like the women’s movement has stalled in certain ways,” said Shteir. “Basic things that Betty was really agitating for, we don’t have.”
—
The post Revisiting Betty Friedan’s Jewish legacy through the first biography of her in decades appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
RSS
Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy
US Vice President and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris speaks during a campaign event in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, US, Aug. 7, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Erica Dischino
Black Muslim leaders across the United States are calling on their supporters to withhold their vote from Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, accusing the incumbent US vice president of facilitating a so-called “genocide” in Gaza.
In a letter published by the Middle East Eye on Monday, 50 black Muslim leaders called on members of their community to embrace the legacy of “black liberation” by only voting for candidates who support a ceasefire in Gaza and an arms blockade on Israel. The coalition of Muslim leaders urged their followers to reject the notion that Harris would be better on domestic issues and that a Donald Trump presidency would pose greater danger to Palestinians.
“As black Muslims, we also know that the Israeli government’s genocide in Gaza is a war on Islam,” the letter read. “The Israeli government and its unhinged army of cowardly criminals have filmed themselves destroying mosques, burning Qurans, and slandering our sacred religious figures. The supremacist Israeli government has also destroyed churches and attacked the Palestinian Christian community.”
The black Muslim leaders condemned the Biden administration for supporting Israel’s defensive military operations against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza. The coalition also slammed Harris for not taking a more adversarial position against the Jewish state since she replaced US President Joe Biden at the top of the Democratic presidential ticket.
“All of this has occurred under the watch of the Biden-Harris administration, which has provided steadfast military, financial, diplomatic, and rhetorical support for the Israeli government’s war crimes for four years, including at least $18 billion since the start of the genocide,” the group wrote.
The Muslim leaders lambasted Harris over her repeated refusals to implement an arms embargo against Israel. In recent months, anti-Israel activists have attempted to pressure Harris into agreeing to block weapons transfers to the Jewish state. In August, the her campaign released a statement denying any support for such a move and affirming Harris’s commitment to ensuring “Israel is able to defend itself.”
“Vice President Harris has explicitly opposed an arms embargo on the Israeli government even though US law requires it. She has refused to lay out any plan whatsoever to force [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu to accept a ceasefire deal in Gaza that ends the genocide,” the letter stated. “She has validated the Israeli government’s efforts to spark a regional war with Iran, leading to instability in the region and the world at large. Just this week, she said that she would not have done anything differently than President Biden over the past four years.”
The coalition attempted to draw a parallel between the experience of black Americans and Palestinians, arguing that the Palestinian inhabitants of Gaza and the West Bank are subject to brutal racial discrimination.
“As Muslims obliged to uphold justice and as black Americans whose ancestors experienced the worst of crimes, genocide must be our red line,” the letter added.
“There’s a false narrative that is being pushed that the majority of Muslims who are black are Kamala Harris supporters,” Imam Dawud Walid, a Muslim leader from Michigan, told the Middle East Eye. “There’s this narrative that is trying to divide the community to say that the majority of Muslims who aren’t black are supporting third party, but the majority of Muslims who are black are somehow divided from the rest of the community, and that’s not true.”
In the final stretch of the 2024 presidential election cycle, the Harris campaign has scrambled to coalesce support among Muslim voters. Despite aggressive overtures toward the Muslim American community, recent polls indicate that the vice president could experience a collapse of support among the demographic. Some polling data has shown Green Party nominee Jill Stein leading Harris among Muslim voters in the critical swing state of Michigan, while other polls show Harris and Trump tied with Muslim voters across battleground states.
Moreover, many Arab American leaders have continued to urge their community to withhold their votes from Harris, arguing that the Democratic party deserves “punishment” for supporting Israel. Groups such as “Abandon Harris” have encouraged Arab American voters to only throw their support behind anti-Israel candidates. Other groups such as the “Uncommitted Movement” have also pushed voters, especially in the Arab and Muslim communities, to refuse to cast a ballot in favor of Harris.
The post Black Muslim Leaders Call on Supporters Not to Vote for Kamala Harris Due to Gaza, Israel Policy first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope
In his 2016 book Essays on Ethics, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote, “A people that can know insecurity and still feel joy is one that can never be defeated, for its spirit can never be broken nor its hope destroyed.”
This year, as Simchat Torah draws near, we are painfully reminded that joy and suffering often coexist. While it is a staple of the human condition for Jews, this paradox echoes relentlessly throughout our history.
In the Diaspora, we will feel this contrast differently. Shmini Atzeret — a day marked by solemnity with Yizkor and the prayer for rain — falls on the anniversary of October 7th. Only the second evening transitions into the joy of Simchat Torah.
In Israel, however, the two days merge into one, with the solemnity of Shmini Atzeret intertwined with the joy of Simchat Torah. This year, embracing the usual high spirits will be incredibly challenging for Israelis. The weight of national grief hangs heavy; indeed, no Simchat Torah will ever be the same again.
When we danced with the Torahs last year, despite knowing that a terrible attack was unfolding, the full extent of the horror was not yet clear. It was only after Simchat Torah ended that the devastating truth began to emerge: 1,200 people tortured, murdered, and mutilated; families torn apart; and hostages dragged into Gaza.
In the months since, every painful detail has come to light, making it nearly impossible to embrace the unrestrained joy that typically defines Simchat Torah. How can we celebrate when every smile is shadowed by memory, and every song tinged with sorrow?
And yet, my late mother’s story comes to mind — her first Simchat Torah after the Holocaust, celebrated in the city of her birth: Rotterdam, Holland. It offers a profound lesson for us today.
My mother was born in 1941, a year after my grandparents married during the Nazi occupation. The Nazis invaded Holland in May 1940, and began deporting Jews to concentration camps in 1942.
Fearing for their lives, my grandparents went into hiding, spending more than two years in a cramped space behind a closet in the home of a gentile friend. My grandfather, active in the Dutch resistance, emerged only at night to carry out covert missions against the Nazis — knowing the risks but refusing to submit to despair.
Meanwhile, my mother was taken in by a Christian couple who raised her as their own, shielding her from the terrors outside. After the war, they returned her to her parents.
When the Nazis were defeated by the Allies in May 1945, Jewish life in Rotterdam began to re-emerge, although only a fraction of the community remained — 75% of Dutch Jewry, more than 100,000 people, had perished in Auschwitz, Sobibor, and other camps.
That fall, the synagogue reopened, and Simchat Torah was celebrated once more. The Torah scrolls my grandfather had hidden with gentile friends were retrieved. Miraculously, Rabbi Levie “Lou” Vorst, who had survived Bergen-Belsen and the infamous “Lost Train,” stood at the helm of the diminished community.
But the celebration was bittersweet. Almost everyone in the synagogue had lost parents, siblings, spouses, or children. My grandparents had lost their parents, siblings, and their second child, my uncle Yitzchak, who had died of malnutrition during the war.
And yet, they danced. Survivors — many without homes or families — clung to the Torah scrolls as if their lives depended on it. My mother, only four years old, stood quietly in the synagogue, receiving candy from weeping survivors. With each piece placed in her open mouth, the message was clear: the future must be sweet, even when the past has been unbearably bitter.
When she was born in 1941, during the Nazi occupation, her parents named my mother Miriam Chana, but they also added a third name: Tikva — hope. Naming her Tikva was a bold act of defiance and a statement of faith that they would live to see better days.
Many Dutch Jews from Rotterdam later made their way to Israel, realizing the ultimate Tikva—the dream of building a new life in the Jewish homeland.
Today, some of my mother’s friends from Rotterdam reside at Beth Juliana, a residential retirement complex in Herzliya for Dutch immigrants. But even there, the echoes of violence persist. Just two weeks ago, during Yom Kippur, a Hezbollah drone from Lebanon struck the building.
Though no one was injured, the drone destroyed an apartment filled with precious heirlooms and decades of memories. Miraculously, the resident had sought shelter moments before the impact — a stark reminder that even now, nearly 80 years after the Holocaust, the shadow of antisemitic hatred still looms over Israel.
As we mark the first anniversary of October 7th, I find myself returning to the image of those weeping survivors dancing with the Torahs in Rotterdam. If they could dance, surely we can too.
But just like them, our dancing this year will be different. Maybe it will be slower, or perhaps more enthusiastic — but whatever it is, it will be infused with memory, sorrow, and, most importantly, defiance. Our celebrations will not deny the pain but embrace it, just as my mother’s community did all those years ago.
The joy of Simchat Torah is not naïve happiness; it is the joy that comes from standing together, united in faith, knowing that despite everything, we are still here. Just as my grandparents emerged from hiding to rebuild, and just as the Torahs were salvaged from the ruins of Rotterdam, we too will lift the Torahs this Simchat Torah and say to our enemies: We are still here.
And we will hope. For without hope, there is no future. My grandparents named their daughter Tikva, believing in a day when evil would be defeated. We, too, must carry the torch of hope into the future. We will dance, and we will cry.
But above all, we will hope. Because even after the darkest of nights, the sun will rise again. And when it does, we will be ready to rebuild — one dance step at a time.
The post On Simchat Torah, We Mourn — But Also Hope first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
RSS
Germany’s Eurovision Contestant Calls Out ‘So Much Hate’ Against Israeli Singer Eden Golan During Competition
The representative of Germany Isaak at the Eurovision Song Cotest entering the main stage on May 11, 2024 in Malmo, Sweden. Photo: Sanjin Strukic/PIXSELL/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Germany’s representative in the 2024 Eurovision Song Contest shared his thoughts in a recent interview about the hatred and booing that Israeli singer Eden Golan received while competing on behalf of Israel in the international competition earlier this year.
“I can definitely understand why everyone was booing, but I think the Eurovision Song Contest says we are all ‘united by music’ and I didn’t see no unity,” German singer Isaak, 29, said in an interview with Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie, referring to the official slogan of the Eurovision competition. He further said of Golan: “It’s a young musician performing quite well and everyone f—ked her off. There was so much hate in this room, and hate shouldn’t be a place in the Eurovision Song Contest.”
Isaak finished in 12th place in the Eurovision finals this year in Malmo, Sweden, while Golan finished in fifth. The Israeli singer competed with a song called “Hurricane,” a reworded version of her original song “October Rain,” which was disqualified for being too political since it referenced the Hamas massacre in Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023.
Golan made it to the top five of the Eurovision contest despite being booed on stage by anti-Israel audience members, facing death threats, and having a Eurovision jury member refuse to give her points because of his personal feelings against Israel’s military actions during the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. Golan also said she had to conceal her identity outside her hotel room in Malmo because of the threats she received from anti-Israel activists angry about the Jewish state’s participation in the contest.
Isaak told Irish blogger allthingsadam.ie that he believes Golan was bullied during the competition. He then criticized people for wrongfully targeting Golan with hatred when they have issues with the state of Israel but not the singer herself. The German singer then said the animosity was misguided and it was wrong for Golan to face such abuse just for her affiliation with Israel. He said a personal experience like what Golan faced can deeply scar a musician
“Do you know how young she is?” Isaak asked about the 21-year-old Israeli singer. “This is your life goal and you wanna be part of Eurovision Song Contest and you’re going on that stage … just image Germany f—ks up in some point. And I’m German and I wanna be part of the Eurovision. And I’m just a random musician, I just wanna show them my music. I’m not the f—k president. I’m just a random musician, I just wanna make a small kid’s dream come true. And then I go on that stage and no matter how good I am, no matter how f—k amazing I can sing, the people just see my country and they just boo me out. I think that would be the most terrible thing that could maybe ever happen to me. I think that can definitely leave scars.”
Isaak also talked in the interview about his experience backstage with the other singers at the Eurovision competition. “You didn’t really have that feeling [that] we are all ‘united by music.’ It was a little bit sad behind the stage, that’s what I think. There could have been more love, more connectivity, and more passion,” he said.
The 2025 Eurovision Song Contest will take place in Basel, Switzerland, in May. Bakel Walden, chairman of the Eurovision Song Contest Reference Group, discussed in a recent interview with Swiss media some changes to next year’s competition. He said the European Broadcasting Union (EBU), which organizes the competition, “will pay more attention” to the well-being of artists in the future and stated that it is vital for the competition to maintain political neutrality. He insisted that “antisemitism has no place at the ESC.”
“The ESC stands for freedom of expression. The artists can comment on anything and also demonstrate in front of the hall. But on stage you need certain rules,” he said. “We want an ESC in which everyone puts their heart and soul into it. We cannot solve the many wars and conflicts in the world during the ESC. But it is a strong statement if we treat each other fairly, peacefully, and respectfully.”‘
Walden added that for next year’s competition the EBU will also have a crisis management team and “retreat rooms” for artists to relax where there will be no filming allowed.
The post Germany’s Eurovision Contestant Calls Out ‘So Much Hate’ Against Israeli Singer Eden Golan During Competition first appeared on Algemeiner.com.